AFL club Port Adelaide still will not record a profit this year despite crowds flocking to its new home ground, Adelaide Oval, and record membership as the team flies high at the top of the league ladder.

Port and fellow tenant Adelaide Crows will hold talks with Adelaide Oval management in early July regarding match day returns for both clubs, who shifted to the ground in the middle of Adelaide at the beginning of the 2014 season.

David Koch
, Port Adelaide’s president, said that while the new home ground will result in an income uplift of about $3.9 million this season, the club will not break even.

“The AFL are fine with that. We presented to them a range of budgets at the start of the year, one of which was showing a break even scenario. But the AFL said they want us to invest in our football department, which is still the second or third lowest spending in the competition."

Port Adelaide made a $1.69 million loss in the 2013 season, down from a $2.12 million loss the previous year.

Koch said the move to Adelaide Oval from the suburban AAMI Stadium has “been fantastic and made an enormous difference for us" in terms of driving merchandise sales and a huge membership increase to 53,000 from about 41,000 last year, including a large rise in members from Adelaide’s eastern suburbs.

Greater share would be fair

But he said that given both of the city’s AFL clubs have attracted huge crowds to their games – Port’s attendances are at least 30 per cent more than its projected 32,000 average crowds, while Adelaide’s home match against Collingwood last Thursday was a 50,000 sell-out – it would be fair for them to have a great financial share from matches at Adelaide Oval.

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“Our corporate revenue is up significantly, about 90 per cent, but we still have not met our budget. There’s a lot more inventory to sell at Adelaide Oval now. We are still not out of the woods yet "

However, Koch said there is a noticeable lag between membership numbers spiking and then corporates spending more money on sponsorship and corporate hospitality, which he hopes augurs well for next year and beyond.

The club’s strong on-field performance could provide a further fiscal silver lining. Currently on the top of the ladder, Port looks set to play a significant part in the AFL finals series later in the year.

“[Our financial situation] may change if we make the finals, but we never budget on making finals," Koch says. Another challenge for Port, according to its president, is retaining good staff with its relatively low spending on employee wages and its football department.

Koch said the club has to be as innovative as possible in terms of keeping employees, one reason it has agreed to undertake a joint venture with its highly-regarded high performance manager Darren Burgess to open a sports science academy in 2015.

The academy would at least partly use the Port Adelaide brand and be open to enrolments from around the world.